I really like the T-Shirt we use as swag at conferences for signing up to various programmes. This was a suggestion from a Twitter competition the Visual Studio team ran a little while ago. I’m sorry but I don’t know the name of the person whose design...

I sometimes get customers asking me about the warnings they’ll get when updates are rolled out across Azure. Well – at the bottom of this post is an example email sent to me. Notice the emphasis placed on: Putting multiple VMs in to availability sets...

I just had a rash of questions about SSL and Azure Web SItes/Web Apps (just for clarity, Azure Web SItes was renamed to Azure Web Apps a few weeks ago). I’ve been looking for an article or post to send people to and am quite amazed at the lack of...

Continuing the theme of exam prep, I thought I’d write a little about Azure Virtual Networks, or VNets. If you see any of the “martetecture” material on the Internet, you’d rapidly come to the conclusion that VNets are a way to securely bind your on-premises...

I’ve booked a couple of exams. The Azure Infrastructure Exam (533) on 15th May. and the Dev exam (532) on 29th May. I thought I’d just write a few articles about stuff I’ve found out between now and then which others who are taking the exam might find...

This came up on a camp I ran yesterday. Somebody noticed in Visual Studio, that the algorithm used for the certificate thumbprint is SHA1. There isn’t an option to change it to SHA256. And all recent advice about SHA1 is to avoid using it and use SHA256...

I just published a video I made on to Channel 9 describing the major features of Azure AD Administrative Units as part of the slew of stuff that was released today. It’s in the “cartoony” style which seems to be the way a lot of people like to consume...

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio would be a free development tool. A special version, called the Community Edition (Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition) which is roughly equivalent to the current Visual Studio Professional...

Mark Renoden, one of my colleagues from Microsoft Australia/New Zealand has come up with this great single line of powershell that spits out everything you want to know about your VMs … Get-AzureVM | ForEach-Object { $vm = $_.name ; Write-Output "...

Building Cloud Applications Track – register on the website. 13:50 – 14:30 Why the Cloud; Why Azure? Steve Plank (Planky) It’s no longer the guy with the most money who can be successful at writing software. With the advent of cloud computing...

Our first live Microsoft Virtual Academy event on July 14 th , Microsoft Cloud Day 2014 with Q&A from Mark Russinovich where registrants will have an opportunity to: · Hear the latest from Azure experts and startups at the recent Azure User Group...

The Azure Weekly runs every Tuesday from 12:30 – 14:00 (UK timezone) and is aimed at the techie who has not yet had any/much exposure to Azure but who just wants a leg-up to get started. This is a more practically focused session than a theoretical/architectural...

This question seems to have come up a lot at a few events I’ve been at recently. Lots of folks know the theory: Azure AD is the Office 365 directory. You can use that Office 365 directory for more than just your Office 365 services like email, collaboration...

James Governor’s (@monkchips) observations ( Red Hat’s entirely rational position on OpenStack ) on recent moves by Red Hat to put additional processes in place to restrict the support they offer is very interesting. It’s an almost fly-on-the-wall observation...

If you don’t know what Azure AD is in the first place – watch my cartoon video . You can either build your own LOB app and integrate it in to Azure AD. Or if you already have one of 1,763 that have already been integrated, you can use that too. Integrating...

The world of the cloud is changing fairly rapidly. I blogged about a week and a half ago about how the Microsoft cloud would be supporting SAP software by the end of June. Well can you believe the pace of change? It was announced a couple of days ago...

I guess it all started to come together with the public cloud and the Enterprise back in June last year when Microsoft and Oracle announced a partnership . I remember a few months later being at IPEXPO 2013 in London and introducing myself to a guy on...

This is a deepzoom of the world’s largest known prime number. Click to watch the DeepZoom in action. Almost 17 and a half million digits. There are only 2 numbers that will divide in to it. One and itself. It’s incredible to think, that within the sheer...

A lot of new features were announced at TechEd. Here they are – straight from the horse’s mouth… At TechEd North America 2014, we announced the general availability of Azure ExpressRoute, Virtual Networking enhancements, compute-intensive...

Creating a WordPress Website using Azure Websites Creating an ASP.NET website using Azure Websites Creating a Virtual Server in Windows Azure Creating a Mobile Service in Windows Azure Creating a Cloud Service in Windows Azure Signing up for a free Windows...

I made a video about this some time ago because of the prevalence of confusion over what you can and can’t do with Azure AD vs. on-premises AD. It’s a regularly recurring theme and it came up with a customer again this morning, so I thought I’d re-blog...

It’s the app that provides the “business value”. The Operating System is just a necessary evil to provide the supporting infrastructure. It’s an utterly captivating and absorbing evil necessity and it keeps a whole load of us in employment, provides us...

In the late 70s/early 80s there was a sudden rash of 8-bit microcomputers on the consumer market. They were all based on either the Zilog Z80 or the MOST 6502 microprocessors. I made a mistake – I bought the Commodore VIC20 which said it had 8k of RAM...

I’ve finally caved in after a webinar yesterday in which this question came up for what seems like the 100th time. So I thought I’d blog it and send people here for the full explanation in the future. Back in the good old bad old days when Microsoft Azure...